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SECOND STYLE ACQUISITION: THE LINGUISTIC SOCIALIZATION OF NEWLY ORTHODOX JEWS A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE DEPARTMENT OF LINGUISTICS AND THE COMMITTEE ON GRADUATE STUDIES OF STANFORD UNIVERSITY IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY Sarah Bunin Benor July 2004 © Copyright 2004 by Sarah Bunin Benor All Rights Reserved ii iii ABSTRACT When people join a new community, change is central to their integration process. Newcomers may change how they dress, how they spend their leisure time, or how they talk. How do they learn and adopt the styles of their new community? This dissertation explores the social processes surrounding second style acquisition, focusing on linguistic style. The analysis is based on a year of ethnographic and sociolinguistic fieldwork in a strictly Orthodox community in Philadelphia. Jews who choose to become Orthodox are called ba’alei teshuva (BTs), as opposed to those who are “frum ‘religious’ from birth” (FFBs). Through observations, interviews, analysis of recorded and observed speech, and a speech perception experiment, I show how the acquisition of language and other symbolic practices helps BTs to integrate into the Orthodox community. Orthodox Jewish identity is constructed and maintained partly through distinctive aspects of dress, home decoration, food, music, and language. Speakers use English with thousands of loanwords from Hebrew and Yiddish. They exhibit syntactic and semantic transfer from Yiddish, as in “He wanted that everybody should be there” and “She was by me (‘at my house’) for Shabbos (‘Sabbath’).” And they use many other distinctive features, including final devoicing (e.g., going => goingk), a click discourse marker, and distinctive rise-fall intonation contours. All BTs acquire at least some of these features, and some change the way they speak so much that they can, at times, pass as FFB. I discuss the factors that affect which features are more likely acquired and which speakers are more likely to acquire them: salience (based on community discourses, imitations, and a matched guise test), individual ability, language ideology, and social alignment and distinction. Using Lave and Wenger’s (1991) model of learning as legitimate peripheral participation, I show how BTs go through stages of social and cultural integration, gradually gaining increased access to roles and styles within the Orthodox community. They are assisted in their integration by interactions of linguistic socialization. And they express their liminality – between their former non-Orthodox selves and the FFB status that they can never attain – through distinctive combinations of symbolic practices. iv PREFACE What’s your dissertation about? It’s about how people learn new ways of speaking their native language. What’s your dissertation about? It’s about Jews who become Orthodox as adults and how they’re integrated into Orthodox communities. What’s your dissertation about? It’s about the Yiddish and Hebrew influences on the English of Orthodox Jews. I answer this “party question” or “airplane question” in any of these ways, depending on the background and interests of the person I’m speaking to. These three answers sound like three separate dissertations (and they certainly could be), but it’s true. This is a dissertation about language socialization, language contact, language acquisition and change over the lifespan, linguistic style in the context of other cultural practices, the role of ideology in individual language change, religious and cultural conversion, Orthodox Jews, ba’alei teshuva, Jewish linguistic distinctiveness, and the connection among English, Yiddish, Modern Hebrew, and textual Hebrew and Aramaic. Because of the many fields and subfields represented here, I have many people to thank. Most importantly, I am grateful to the community members of “Milldale” and “Ner Tamid” for your hospitality and your openness to my research. Thank you for the time you spent as my consultants and for your commitment to hachnasas orchim (‘hospitality’). I will cherish the memories and the friendships. Special thanks to those who went above and beyond in helping me with my research and making me feel welcome: the people I refer to as Rabbi Fischer, Andrew, Moyshe, Shelley, Levi, and Shira. On the academic side, I would like to thank my committee – Eve Clark, Penny Eckert, Arnie Eisen, and John Rickford – for their valuable suggestions and attention to detail. An important factor in the development of my thinking about sociolinguistics was the Style and Language Ideologies Collaborative (SLIC) at Stanford. Thank you to the faculty and graduate students who participated in SLIC in 1999-2000. I am grateful to the many scholars of Jewish studies, anthropology, and linguistics who have answered my questions or given me helpful suggestions over the last few years, v including Asif Agha, Shani Bechhofer, Dan Ben-Amos, Emily Bender, Mara Benjamin, Lila Corwin Berman, Marcy Brink, Mary Bucholtz, Kathryn Campbell-Kibler, Robert Chazan, Ayala Fader, Joshua Fishman, Edward Flemming, Hershl Glasser, Jen Roth Gordon, Kathy Hall, Benjamin Hary, Joel Hecker, Samuel Heilman, Robert Hoberman, Andrea Jacobs, Ben Jacobs, Jill Jacobs, Paul Kiparsky, Aaron Koller, Beth Levin, Aaron Levy, Jim Loeffler, Deborah Dash Moore, Anne Eakin Moss, Ken Moss, Leah Mundell, Jess Olson, Rakhmiel Peltz, Dina Pinsky, Rob Podesva, Riv-Ellen Prell, Dennis Preston, Mary Rose, Gabriella Safran, Roberta Sands, Gillian Sankoff, Tsuguya Sasaki, Ahud Sela, Jeffrey Shandler, Adam Shear, Moshe Simkovich, Bernard Spolsky, Julie Sweetland, Elizabeth Traugott, Joel Wallenberg, Chaim Weiser, Andrew Wong, Stanton Wortham, Steven Zipperstein, and Ghil’ad Zuckermann. I want to thank Gillian Sankoff, Tony Kroch, Bill Labov, and David Ruderman for facilitating my time as a visiting student/scholar at the University of Pennsylvania, and the Penn graduate students in Linguistics and Jewish Studies for serving as a surrogate cohort. I am most grateful for the research and editing help I received from Suzanne Evans Wagner and Marjorie Pak. And thanks to Wharton’s Paul Rosenbaum and Zhihua Qiao for advice on statistics. Parts of this dissertation were presented in colloquia at Stanford University and Emory University and at four conferences in 2003-4: New Ways of Analyzing Variation, the American Anthropological Association, the Association for Jewish Studies, and the Linguistic Society of America. Thank you to the people who attended my talks and gave me valuable comments. Thanks to my friends and friends of friends who helped me record the matched guise test, especially my sister, Miriam Benor, who also contributed to this dissertation in other ways. And thanks to Harold Goldhamer, Mark Bunin Benor, Roberta Benor, and David Benor for their valuable editing suggestions. The preparation of this dissertation was made possible by grants from the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture and the National Foundation for Jewish Culture for the Kogan Foundation Fellowship of the Maurice and Marilyn Cohen Fund for Doctoral Dissertation Fellowships in Jewish Studies. Thank you to the Wexner Foundation for generously supporting my graduate studies and providing continuing professional development opportunities. Also for funding, thanks to the Stanford vi Linguistics Department (Goodan Family Fellowship), the Newhouse grants of the Stanford Jewish Studies Program, the Graduate Research Opportunities program, and the Bay Area chapter of Phi Beta Kappa. I am grateful to my family and friends for being so interested in and supportive of my research. Special thanks to my parents and parents-in-law for their multifaceted support. I cannot find enough ways to thank my wonderful husband, Mark Bunin Benor, who has always been interested and involved in my theorizing, data collection, and analysis, and who gave me the most prolific and helpful advice on the dissertation. This dissertation is dedicated to my adorable daughter, Aliza Rose Bunin Benor, whose presence in my womb enhanced my fieldwork experiences and whose sweetness and cuteness since she was born have spurred me in my work. TRANSCRIPTION CONVENTIONS For Hebrew and Yiddish words, I generally use spelling conventions common in the community. Examples include Shabbos and mitzvos (rather than the YIVO Yiddish transliteration system shabes and mitsves). There is a great deal of variation in the orthography of Jewish English, and I often had to make choices between several variants. Where phonetic detail is at issue, I use more detailed phonetic transcription, including characters from the International Phonetic Alphabet (font: SIL IPA93 – Doulos). For the reader’s sake, I usually use English plurals (s, es), even if most community members would use -im, -ach, or other loan plurals. vii TABLE OF CONTENTS Chapter 1: Introduction ..................................................................................................... 1 Introduction................................................................................................................... 2 Style .............................................................................................................................. 3 Language ideology........................................................................................................ 5 The linguistic construction of identity .......................................................................... 7 Alignment and distinction............................................................................................